Privacy-Preserving Hierarchical Fog Federated Learning (PP-HFFL) for IoT Intrusion Detection

The rapid expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) across critical sectors such as healthcare, energy, cybersecurity, smart cities, and finance has increased its exposure to cyberattacks. Conventional centralized machine learning-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) face limitations including data privacy risks, legal restrictions on cross-border data transfer, and high communication overhead. To overcome these challenges, we propose Privacy-Preserving Hierarchical Fog Federated Learning (PP-HFFL) for IoT intrusion detection, where fog nodes serve as intermediaries between IoT devices and the cloud, collecting and preprocessing local data, training models on behalf of IoT clusters. The framework incorporates Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) to handle heterogeneous, non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data and leverages Differential Privacy (DP) to protect sensitive information. Experiments on RT-IoT 2022 and CIC-IoT 2023 datasets demonstrate that PP-HFFL achieves detection accuracy comparable to centralized systems, reduces communication overhead, preserves privacy, and adapts effectively across non-IID data. This hierarchical approach provides a practical and secure solution for next-generation IoT intrusion detection.